


Got to Find a Reason (a Reason Things Went Wrong)

by NothingEnough



Series: anywhere but inbetween (generation x) [2]
Category: Generation X (Comic)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe, Autism, Body Horror, Canon Autistic Character, Cigarettes, Gang Violence, Gen, Homelessness, Language, Marijuana, Menstruation, Puberty, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Harassment, Trans Female Character, Transgender, Underage Drug Use, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 12:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5005297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingEnough/pseuds/NothingEnough
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So... how did everybody get here? (trans!Monet, implied Jono/Paige UST, implied Jubilee/Everett UST, implied Jono/Angelo UST, please see tags for other warnings)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Got to Find a Reason (a Reason Things Went Wrong)

Usually it's just him and Jono in the basement, like two monsters who've uneasily agreed to be roomies 'til one of them finds their own set of stairs to lurk under. It's too dark, too cold, too cut off from the game-room and the fridge and a general sense of safety--if you screamed down there, nobody'd hear you. 

You get down there by pulling open a trapdoor sunk in the floor of the garage-cum-homeroom and, probably hunching your shoulders and ducking your head and watching your feet, you walk down a narrow, flimsy staircase. You gotta pull the trapdoor shut or bugs get in. The walls are concrete brick and give the impression that you're in a fifties bomb shelter. 

There's two bulbs hung by cords from the ceiling, both with busted filaments, and Jono never bitches about it to Emma, so the light--what light there is--comes from two, maybe three, sources. One, there's an old floor-lamp with a plain white half-globe over the bulbs, and it gives a misty glow over the walls and furniture. Two, the tv is _always_ on--whether it's MTV or VH1 or a video game pause-screen or static, at least it gives off something. Three, sometimes, when Angelo sneaks down here, Jono leaves his face unwrapped. He can't really describe how the place looks in Jono's light, kind of like a lava lamp and a plasma-ball put together, little threads and billows and bubbles of blue and near-purple shifting and rotating over the posters and the concrete.

Not tonight, though, because tonight, they ain't alone. Doc Zen's konked out upstairs and Doc Gateway's in his dollhouse, Sean's off at the Xavier Academy for some damn reason or other, Emma's got some shit with her company going on. For one night, at least, they're all left to their own devices. And even though Angelo fucking told her not to, Jubilation told the rest of them about his stash and how nobody can smell it if you smoke in the basement, so over the last hour, literally everybody's come stumbling down them stairs.

Least he's making money.

Angelo takes a second hit and passes the blunt to Paige. She holds it between two fingertips, stares at it like she ain't sure which end goes in her mouth. Then she pinches the filter (a rolled-up shred of paper) in her fingers and takes a professional hit.

Angelo exhales, cackles. "Damn, Paige, you didn't come off like a stoner."

She gives him a fuck-you glare, gorgeous dark-blue eyes narrowing into dangerous slits, and holds her smoke.

"This is so stupid," Everett says for the fourth time. Him, he is new to this--he's had three hits and the whites of his eyes are an almost shocking red. He'd told Angelo before that he couldn't risk drugs; a black man caught with lye gets DEALER tattooed on his forehead by society, and ain't nothing he can do to bounce back.

"Dude, lighten up," Jubilation says, clapping a bony hand on Everett's shoulder. The four of them are sitting on the floor around a coffee-table; Angelo sits with his back to the TV, he can see everybody from here--and more important, he can see the faraway outline of the trapdoor. He never feels right unless he can see his escape route. Jono's on the couch, looped in on himself and around his guitar, playing "White Riot" for the third time in a row. Monet sits sort of near him--she's technically over the couch, but she's floating a foot away from the ceiling, cross-legged, winding a necklace chain around her fingers, unwinding, doing it again.

"Nobody here's a snitch. I swear, Sean's walked right by the trapdoor before when me and Ange blazed, and, like, nothing. I'm not bullshitting, we'll be fine."

Paige hacks, coughs. Angelo offers her a sarcastic round of applause. After a second, he hears a second set of hands clapping, punctuated by a metallic hiss; Monet. Paige glares up at her. "You wanna stay in the peanut gallery, darlin', or you wanna join us?"

"I'm fine," Monet says. "I'm not convinced it will work on me tonight."

Paige has a second go, then passes it to Everett. He immediately gives it to Jubilation. "I gotta say," Jubilation says, "this is, like, the one thing we've got that the real X-school doesn't. Nobody does shit there other than schoolwork. You are a saint, Angelo."

"Yeah, sure," he says, "that's me. Saint Angelo Antonio, patron saint of those who lost their connections."

The bumbling, hoarse laughter from his (friends?) goes on a little longer than it needs to, until Monet, of course it's Monet, pipes up again. Her voice sounds very small. "How did you end up at the Xavier Academy, Jubilation?"

Jubilation immediately loses her smoke to a shocked cough. It takes her a few seconds to compose herself. "Wait," she manages, voice rasping, "what?"

"I don't mean any offense," and he'll give her this, Monet's been here five months and she's better at adding lines like that to her speech. She can't change her tone, she still sounds like a snob, but she tries. Angelo can respect that. "My understanding is that you attended the central academy before this one was founded, then were transferred here. I don't really care why you transferred. It's not my business. However, I am curious how you ended up traveling across a large continent to attend in the first place. Many mutants don't receive this privilege, you know."

Jubilation stares up at Monet like she'd enjoy grabbing Monet by the ankle and yanking her back to earth. "What the fuck, Ems? You don't just ask that kind of shit."

"Well, not without demonstrating a willingness to share information equally," Monet says, hunching over so she can get a better view, fingers snaked over with thin silver chain, her long tunic-y pink shirt hanging like a curtain over her half-bare legs.

"Wait, hang on a sec," Everett says. "Are you asking how she got to the Academy, or how she got her powers, or what? I'm not following."

"Either. To show my sincerity, I'll tell you both of my stories."

Jubilation's eyes meet Angelo's, and they both wince. They know a little about how Monet got her powers, enough to know that she took some personal risk in telling it. Quickly, before the blunt goes out, Jubilation takes a hit, then says, each word punctuated with a stream of bluish smoke, "Don't, don't worry about it, Ems, I--"

Monet says, "When I was born, my parents thought I was a boy."

Paige's mouth drops open. Jubilation skips Angelo and, leaning over the table, holds the blunt-filter against Paige's lips. Paige automatically inhales. Angelo pushes his scalp out of his eyes and picks up a couple of wrappers. He sneaks a look at Everett and, man, there's that friendly light in his eyes and a little quirk in his eyebrows, and that's it. No shock, no disgust, no betrayal. Cool. He's pretty cool.

Jono moves on to "Killing in the Name".

"I thought I was, too," she says, "only it never, well, it never really fit. It's difficult to describe. I did everything appropriate for a boy. There was just... something... about me... that I didn't like. In a way I could not explain. A je ne sais quoi . And then I entered puberty, an occasion marked by me waking up one day to find I now had the internal and external genitalia configuration associated with the capacity to give birth. And that I was menstruating. I remember staring at my mirror for perhaps twelve minutes, studying myself, and I remember thinking that this solved that problem I'd never been able to even put into words. My parents, of course, took a lot more convincing, but it helped that both my sisters had mutations. One of my sisters works in the UN, a job which permitted her occasional contact with the Professor, and that was that. She used her contacts and my parents used their money, and I was shipped overseas into the care of Dr. McCoy, pending the opening of a facility more appropriate for my needs. And here I am."

Well... okay. If she wanted it told, it was her business, and he guesses this is as good a place as any for shit like that. Where the fuck else in this world could any of them count on an audience who won't whip out the tomatoes and the firearms over a story like Monet's? And it might be the high talking, but Angelo spent most of his recent life several worlds apart from safety. And now this. Everett's just nodding; Paige coughs, the wide surprise in her eyes shifting to heavy-lidded acceptance; Jono looks like he's in his guitar-world but it's really that he ain't judging; and he and Jubilation knew already.

Maybe because they're all mutants. Maybe because their lives are fucked up. Maybe because of the green.

She looks at her hands. The chain half-weaves between her fingers into a string-figure, one Angelo recognizes from Gateway using it pretty often, the Doctor says it represents the sun. Vaguely Monet's eyes focus beyond her hands and consider those beneath her, the haze of smoke drifting up into her face, and she says: "I may have spoken too hastily when I said it wouldn't affect me. I'm not usually this talkative. I have acquired a contact high."

Mostly because of the green.

Paige snorks and tries to pass it back to Angelo, sees he's constructing another, and passes it to Everett. "So, Jubilation," Paige says, "your go."

"... you're kidding, right? No fucking way I'm gonna follow a story like that," says Jubilation. "You go, Everett."

"Shit," says Angelo, pausing to lick the cigar wrapper, "that's what that is. You're just trying to get outta it."

"I'll do it when my story's not gonna look like a plastic tube-top on the clearance rack," says Jubilation. She leans back, almost thunks her head on the couch-cushion behind her, swings forward to right herself, almost faceplants into the coffee table. "Also, finding my balance. Need to do that first. Priorities."

"I don't mind," Everett says, punctuating with a cough. Angelo shrugs, not in a mood to fight a battle for somebody who doesn't mind losing. If he wants Jubilation to jerk him ahead of her in line, it's his business. "Well, uh, like all of us, it started when I hit puberty, and for me, that was when I turned thirteen. And one Saturday, some of my boys and I were out kicking this poor soccer ball to death. We split into two groups, one on each sidewalk, and we kicked it back and forth across the street. If you hit a window or a car, your team lost, and you kept going 'til somebody damaged some property. Just, you know, messing around. We were kids.

"Except on this Saturday, when this car drove our way. I remember Les's face setting hard, like he made up his mind to risk it, he swung his leg back and he kicked it in a beautiful arc. It would've been more beautiful if it hadn't bounced off the car's hood. It was a cream-colored land-yacht of a car. The ball left a dirty mark on the hood. The car screeched to a stop and the driver rolled down his window to scream at us for fooling with his paint job. My friends were all frozen in place, nobody ever bothered to stop before, they were a little afraid. I was a lot afraid because the moment the car halted, I felt... this... this heat."

Angelo realizes he's taken five puffs of the new blunt when Jubilation--moving carefully, eyes on Everett--kicks him with the toe of her sneaker. He takes a sixth just to be a dick and passes it to her.

"I thought I was dying," Everett says, and he _laughs_. "Me. Dying of a heart attack at the age of thirteen. I fell back on my butt on the sidewalk. I did not think I could walk. My knees felt like they were melting. So I crawled, as quiet as anybody can crawl, off the sidewalk and into an alley. And the second I got in the alley, fire bled out of my skin and covered my eyes like, like bright hands."

"Damn, son," says Jubilation.

"That's how it went," he says. "I didn't make the connection at first. I thought, I thought fire was my power. Until my mom asked me to walk Vanessa to her therapy one afternoon, and I tried to cross the street with her, and I had to let go of her hand because I was sprouting claws. She thought it was badass. Scared me right out of my mind. When I calmed down, while I was waiting for her to be out of therapy, I realized that both times, the whatever-it-was only happened when I was in a crowd. So I started going into crowds on purpose, testing that hypothesis, and sure enough, it worked. I realized after a while that the girl at the ticket-counter at Regal Cinema was a telepath, since every time I went to see a movie, I'd get to the front of the line and suddenly know the life secrets of every-damn-body around me."

"If you ever synch up with Emma," says Angelo, "you better stay out of my head."

Everett blinks at him. The action takes a good five seconds. "I'll try." He reaches for a Pepsi he stashed under the coffee-table and drinks half the can. "Anyway, how I ended up here is less interesting, I suppose. My people are involved in a few different kinds of advocacy. Civil rights for racial minorities, feminism, rights for mentally disabled people, immigration, if there's a cause, one of my family's got their head in it. I figured they'd just make it another cause. So I told them I thought I might be a mutant. They were... surprised, but then Ma said she knew somebody who volunteered with the local Democratic Party, who knew somebody who was into mutant advocacy. She made a ton of phone calls, and the top of the phone tree was the Xavier Academy. I got in and my powers kept screwing with my ability to do anything in class, so I..."

"Ended up here," Jubilation says and passes the blunt back to its creator. She grins at Everett the whole time. She likes him. Angelo can see it in how she wrinkles her nose when she smiles at him.

"I guess so. So now it's your turn, right?"

"I wonder," Paige says, smoke crackling her voice, her head listing to the right, tangled blonde hair drifting over her shoulder, "what Omelas would say if she could."

That's a highdea if Angelo ever heard one, the kind of stupid, hopeless question no one sober ever asks, since sober people know there's shit that'll never get answered. But his thoughts are pretty smoked out, his brain races down that avenue in a souped-up engine: did Omelas turn into what she is quick or slow? Did it hurt? Did her family try to kill her, or leave her somewhere to die? What language did she speak when she used to speak? Did she cry or did she think it was a relief, a shield? Did she not understand why light bent around her in a corona, or did it feel right?

Does she hear anything? Do Jono and Emma and Monet reach her? Would anything they pried out of her brain make any sense?

Angelo realizes after a half-minute that he's just staring at the blunt. He takes in the rest of the room. His smoking buddies all look about at their respective limits. Monet seems to be forgetting how to float, her curled-up body's half-spinning like a twenty in the wind as her fingers tell a string-story. Jono decided to leave RATM alone for the moment; his fingers tell a different story, the opening chords of some song Angelo never heard before Jono played it two months back, something about stealing bread and going hungry.

Nobody needs another puff. He flicks two fingers across the table, grabs an empty can of Dew, drags it in front of him, and proceeds to murder the blunt by beheading. The cherry zizzes at the bottom of the can.

Paige, her voice all honeyed up with her natural accent, suddenly says: "I was thirteen. Goin' on fourteen."

"Okay," says Everett, looking at her with--Angelo can't tell if it's nervousness or interest. He's squinting, which can be blamed on the smoke, but he's almost not-smiling, which is fucked up since that's like his default expression. "Okay, Paige. We're listening."

"I was late," Paige says. She sounds supremely far away. Like she's dreaming about telling her story. "In a few ways. All my girl friends had started, y'know, having periods, or at least they said they did, and I was the odd girl out. And I come from a, uh, there's, I got five brothers an' six sisters, and seven are mutants. Seven. And I was always the one with the skinny legs and the weak arms, the one who cried when James made us watch scary movies, the one who didn't fit. I was dead set on bein' number eight. At least then I'd have somethin' special about me.

"And I got... a cut... on mah leg. And no matter how often I cleaned it and bandaged it, it wouldn't get better. After awhile I got so sick I fainted in class. They called my parents. They dragged me to the doctor. She had to cut my jeans off and I screamed every time she tried to touch me, just to get a swab to get an idea of what the hell was breeding in this giant festering pus-filled welt on my body. Finally she talked me into bearing it enough for her to take a swab, and a big old chunk of my leg fell off. It made this sound when it hit the tile floor."

Angelo tries to light a cigarette. His hands are shaking. The match dies out.

Paige, still dreaming out loud: "An' when that came free, it felt better. Lots better. Only the rest of me hurt, now, and it wasn't the sharp infection pain like around the cut, it was an itch. A godawful itch. And I figured if I scratched--"

"I can't," Jubilation says, her tone as final as her words. She's half-curled up into a fetal ball, and she's chewed a raw patch on her bottom lip. "I'm, like, oh my god, Paige, I can't. I'm itching just hearing about it."

"I can't handle all this shit about skin," Angelo says, smoking his cigarette like he's mad at it.

"Maybe... a little less detail?" Everett says. He stares at the pockmarked tabletop and his Adam's apple bobs up and down, up and down.

It gets so quiet you can hear the hum of the bluescreened TV beneath the sound of Jono's guitar. Only, no, he can't hear the guitar, the music's stopped. Angelo looks at the couch. Monet's settled on one side now, trying to untangle her fingers from the chain. Jono's hands are frozen in the middle of a note. His weird eyes regard the circle of teenagers before him.

All at once, Angelo thinks: "Tell Paige you're sorry." That's not his thought. The voice is English as the Queen. From how Jubilation, Everett, and Monet all flinch, he's not the only one who got it, either. "Nobody--" Monet starts. "You hurt her feelings. Tell her you're sorry." 

Angelo got so wrapped up in not imagining what Paige described, he did kind of forget that he wasn't hearing her out. He looks at her now, and what do you know; Jono might be autistic, but he's also not high, and he saw the absolute _pain_ on Paige's face before anybody else. Sharp lines cut down the middle of her forehead and from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are shut. She twirls a few strands of hair around her finger, and as Angelo watches, she yanks, pulling them out by the root.

Shit. Shit, shit. This ain't right, this ain't what he wanted. He speaks first. "Lo siento. Sorry, Paige. Mine's gonna be the grossest of 'em all, so, you know, go on, finish."

"No."

"I'm sorry, too," Jubilation says.

"Me, too," Everett says. "Heck, I told you about the time I caught on fire. You can finish your story, with all the detail you want."

"Yes, please," says Monet. She does that sometimes.

Mumbling, staring at the now-free strands of hair wrapped around her finger: "My daddy threw up when he saw me after."

"What an asshole," says Jubilation. Trying a little too hard, maybe, but she does that sometimes, too. And how did Angelo go from having nobody for years to knowing all these people well enough to headshrink them?

"It was pretty gross," and a shy, tentative smile touches Paige's face. "I mean, I was, the skin comin' off, that's gross. But I wasn't. I felt... so... beautiful once it was all off. It sounds real weird, but I became wood. It was some kinda redwood. I still bent at the elbows and the knees like usual, but I coulda taken a bullet if I wanted. And it kinda changed my brain, too. I thought different. Like, I dunno how to say it, it was like I almost turned into a tree that could think, once I got all set in. Didn't really wanna go back. Y'know? And by the time I turned back, my ma got on the horn to my brother who works for the good ol' Professor, and that's all she wrote."

Another round of quiet, this one a little more comfortable, natural. Angelo breathes deep and the filter of his cigarette heats up against his lips. He cusses, drops it into the Dew can, considers his array of papers and one last blunt-wrap and the bag of mid-grade green. Paige looks like she could use another one. He picks up the wrapper. A warm strum of notes from Jono's guitar, followed by a neat series of plucks and plinks--that ain't fair, man, ese can play Spanish guitar as well as classic. This song, he'd never heard it before Jono played it, he said it was about the Spanish Civil War. Once he sang it for Angelo, his accent all tangled up in the Spanish, making it obvious he knew the words by sound and not by fluency. It was cute. (The song, about a cockfight between a red and a black rooster, was not.)

"Jubilation," says Everett, cracking his knuckles and resting his hands on the coffee table. "If you don't go now, nobody's gonna trust you ever again."

"Like, lemme wait for that," Jubilation says, thin fingers pointing at the thick line of herb laid in a line over the blunt-wrapper.

"Oh, horsepucky," says Paige. "It cain't be that bad, girl."

"No, it's just not, it's just not that cool," Jubilation says. She leans back 'til her shoulders hit the couch-cushions. Monet, still telling her string-story, rests a leg over Jubilation's shoulder, knee over collarbone, foot hovering over Jubes's leg. Angelo's brain provides a few images inspired by pornography. He shakes his head hard to shut that shit down, feels his cheeks swinging like pendulums around his head, and it really is nice that nearly everyone here's too high to care how much he's sagging. The headache he'd have normally would be indescribable.

"I was kind of like Paige," she says at last, "at least, in the period department. Like, I had my girls, my four best friends, and I was like dead last to start. When I finally got it, it was three weeks after my thirteenth birthday. My girls said we gotta go to the mall to celebrate. We went to the mall all the time anyway, 'course, there wasn't much else to do in my part of LA for free. But this time, they all swore to throw in five bucks and buy me the new boots I'd been coveting for lo these many years.

"So picture me, wearing this really regrettable green jacket and pink sunglasses, you know, and my old crappy boots, limping 'cause it feels like my ovaries are gettin' used as castanets. My girls and I stroll through the mall, and we decide to stop at Spencer's before we went on to Retread's. And, like, you know Spencer's, they have all that weird shit everywhere, the gross posters and the plasma balls and ashtrays shaped like boobs. I was hanging around a display of the plasma balls, touching 'em and making my hair stand up, and--pass me that, Ange--"

He wraps up his second hit, raises an eyebrow at Paige. She gestures towards Jubilation-- _go ahead_. He passes it her way.

"Thanks, man, you're a prince." She pauses for an enormous hit. "And all's of a sudden I realize there's this guy standing like right behind me. Like _right_ behind me, I can feel his body heat and his breath. Before I can turn around, he says--" Another hit, and she's trying to put this off, and Angelo can't figure out why yet. Her next words are shaped in blue haze: "'Hey, china doll, you've got a great technique for touching balls.'"

He can't help it. He laughs. Hits the coffee table with his forehead and just shrieks laughter. It's probably one of the nastiest pickup lines he's ever heard that didn't involve a cuss-word ("china doll"?). Judging from how hard everyone else guffaws, he's not the only one. Jubilation thinks it's pretty funny, too, hopefully Jono won't demand another round of apologies.

"I mean, dudes--I'm talking to the dudes here--can you tell me what in the fuck goes through your heads when you hit on a girl like that?"

"I never hit on a mamí like that," Angelo says.

"Me either," Everett says, wiping tears from the corner of his bloodshot eye.

Five sets of eyes turn to Jono. He does not look up from his guitar; after a few seconds, Angelo gets a mental message: "I came up with some pretty pathetic lines in my day. But nothing that racist, as far as I know. And nothing I'd say to a thirteen-year-old. How old was he?"

"Probably twenty," Jubilation says, and she's still smiling, but Angelo feels his own dying on his drooping lips. "Dudes like that hang around the mall, you know, they live for exactly what he was doing to me. I was used to it, so I turned around and told him he didn't have tweezers small enough for me to touch his balls."

Another round of THC-fueled cackling and coughing. You had to laugh or you'd cry. Just as Angelo starts thinking that no thirteen-year-old girl should be that ready to deal with a pervert, Jubilation passes the blunt to Paige and moves on: "I thought he might get pissy and leave me alone, but he didn't know when to quit. It was... really weird. White guys, the ones who hit on me, they're like a--you know, those spinny things on top of buildings that tell you the way the wind blows?"

"A weathervane," says Paige.

"I knew you'd know."

"Fuck you."

"So, yeah, white guys making a pass. They're like a weathervane for whatever bullshit white people think about 'the Asians'. He was, like, he had a fetish. He muttered every creepy cliché he knew in my general direction, all dragon-lady and Madame Butterfly and God knows what else. And it was funny, but him just not letting up wasn't, and I really couldn't get away from him, he had me boxed in against the shelves. So I picked up one of the plasma balls and I thought about cracking it open over his stupid, empty head. And my hands burned, my head throbbed, my sight blinked out, and when I came to, I was holding the base of the plasma ball and glass was everywhere, and he was screaming."

"Good," says Everett. Angelo nods.

"Fucking creep," says Paige.

"He deserved it," Monet says, joining the conversation at last; her chain forms a spiral around her right index finger. Idly: "Did he have to go to the hospital?"

"No, I don't think so. I think I just scared the piss out of him," Jubilation says. "And me. I dropped the base and sneaked out while he was flailing around and whining. I went home. Nobody ever pressed charges. I didn't even get my damn boots." She shrugs, Monet's leg rising and falling along with her shoulders. "I got caught by my parents, uh, testing what had happened. My dad came to check on me doing my homework and saw me sitting on the bed, all the lights in my room turned off, surrounded by paffs. They freaked. They called the adoption agency for advice. An' from what I know now, I got really, seriously lucky. Like there are agencies that are fronts for, you know, the Brotherhood, and there are prolly fronts for other groups, too, anti-mutant groups and shit. But mine was owned by..."

She pauses, looks around, waits to see if anybody cares to guess.

"Greymalkin Industries," says Monet.

"Ding-ding. So they redirected my 'rents to the Academy, and when I kept blowing shit up there, they shipped me here. I guess they figured if I blew up this school it'd be in the middle of nowhere." She watches as Everett takes a single puff. Her eyes are nowhere near Angelo, so it makes him jump when her next words are "You're up, Ange."

"... ¿qué?"

"Don't you qué me, it's your turn."

His heart pounds in his ears. He guesses this had to happen once Everett joined in, but he hung on to the wordless hope that maybe they'd forget, or skip him over, or maybe it'd all end with Jubilation. Shit. Shit shit shit. He can't imagine them wanting to hear his story, not to the end, they'll stop him like Paige and nobody will ask for them to say they're sorry to him because...

"Gimme that fuckin' blunt," he says. He leans over the table and snatches it from Paige. Two hits and his heart slows and he thinks he thinks a little more clearly. He gives it back to Paige, then grabs a cigarette, then says:

"Okay. Okay. Started when I was twelve. Some of it was usual, you know, growin' hair and wantin' shit I never really wanted 'til then, and some of it wasn't. I noticed the first time about four months after my birthday. I thought I was losing weight, I had this little--not much, maybe a fistful--this little slack around my waist. So I ate like a horse, I didn't wanna be the skinniest kid at my school, I'd get every kind of shit kicked outta me. So I ate and ate and the slack turned into flab. Eight months after my twelfth birthday and I dressed like a cholo all the time, all baggy shirts and jackets and giant pairs of jeans held up with a belt, but shit, that was just to hide how loose it all was."

He pauses. Everybody's quiet. Maybe they learned from Paige. No one's telling him to can it. "I lasted 'til I was fourteen, staying at home. Mi máma complained about me outgrowing clothes and wearing shit so loose you couldn't see my body. I couldn't tell her that was the point. She hates mutantos. She always say she saw that mutanta on the news when she was a little girl, you know, the blue one, and so far as mi máma knew, all mutantos were like that. It's not her fault. It's not. She's not stupid, she's just had a really hard life and she needs a few people to hate so she doesn't hate herself.

"Fourteen rolls around and I'm using about twenty clothespins to keep my fucking body inside of my clothes. My grades are shit, the pins hurt and the headaches just killed. My whole family's pissed 'cause I was doing so well 'til then. A little after my birthday--nine days--I woke up and saw this... gray patch on my chest... when I went to get into my T-shirt. I just stared at it. I started to cry. It wasn't fair. I had hiding my loose skin down to an art, and now I gotta turn gray? No way I could keep mi familia from seeing I'm going gris. I waited. Maybe it would go away. Maybe it wouldn't spread. Maybe it was sickness and I'd die and never have to see the look on máma's face when she got a good look at my body.

"And the next day it was twice as big and another one was on my right leg, and another under my right arm. My life was over. I couldn't keep hiding. I couldn't just kill myself, I still felt like that was a sin too far. So I packed my backpack with clothes and a little cash instead of books, said goodbye to máma, and instead of going to school, I kept walking."

"God," says Paige.

"How long did that last? Running away, I mean." Monet, picking at a knot in her chain.

"Two years." He burned right through that cigarette. He lights another and pretends he doesn't hear the varying exclamations from his audience. "I didn't stay in LA long. I kept outta flyover country. Mostly I went up and down the West Coast, then crossed the estados near the Canadian border. Safer there than the southern border. And not so bad in the summertime. Then the East Coast, down to Atlanta once, but mostly I kept outta the fucking South. I went back to LA once. I was all gray and had maybe four and a half feet of skin by then, but I, you know, I missed mi familia, thought they'd forgive me. I got into town the day after they let off those pigs who beat the shit outta Rodney King. Left on day two, before the cops got a chance to organize, coño, they'd just fucking kill me if they found me. 

"So I went back to the old routine 'til about half a year ago. Then I did something stupid, I squatted with a bunch of other people in one house. Tonteria. That place was begging for a raid. Too many people, but I was really hungry and, you know, lonely, and they didn't care how I looked. So of course the place gets raided by the Boston PD, and of course I trip over my own fucking knees and I get caught.

"Next day they let us all go. All our fines and bail and whatever, all paid in full. I come out of the station dragging what felt like thirty pounds of skin behind me, and this bald guy in a wheelchair looks at me and says 'Wait a moment, son'. So I call him a pendejo and keep walking."

"You... called... Professor Xavier... a pendejo." Everett's eyes are as wide and amazing as two suns.

"Nobody calls me son." The laughter crashing into his ears is desperate, he ignores it, he's almost done and he's sick of remembering. "So he tells me about his organization, and asks if I wanted a place to stay. I figured at that point that if he was a pervert, I could probably fight him off, and if I couldn't, well, it had to be better than jail. I was so... fucking... tired."

Quiet, too quiet. Nobody knows what to say. All the smoke and the pain took everybody to a dark place. Everett stares at the flag Jono hung on the wall by the TV, it's purple and gold and red but the colors look off in the blue light. Monet pulls her leg back up, shifts 'til she's cross-legged, and hangs her chain around her neck. Paige looks at Angelo with something intense and curious in her pretty round eyes, head tilted to the left. Jubilation picks at one of her cuticles. Jono picks out the vocals for that stupid eighties song "The Promise", and that's bad--Jono only plays pop when something's eating him. 

Probably because he knows what comes next.

The blunt gets close to the filter before somebody finally says it. "Jono," says Paige. "You're the only one left."

Jono plucks harder, nearly snapping the strings as he plays _I'm just thinking of the right words to say_ , and Angelo wonders if that's on purpose. "No."

"Oh come _on_ ," says Jubilation. "You can't not. Not now. We all went."

"No."

"It's only fair," Monet says. "You know all our secrets. We ought to know yours."

"We're all friends here," says Everett, and Angelo isn't sure that's really true, but maybe it is. These assholes are the closest thing he's had to friends in years. Maybe closest is as good as he'll get. "I swear to God, I'm taking everything everybody says tonight to the grave."

"Word," says Jubilation.

"Besides, we might not remember it all tomorrow, anyhow," Paige says.

"No."

"Por dios," mutters Angelo, "what, did your powers come in while you were jerking off? What's the big deal?"

That gets a snicker out of Jubilation, and the glare Jono gives him almost boils the Pepsis and Dews on and under the coffee table. Abruptly Jono sets the guitar aside, turning to rest it butt on the floor and neck on the armrest. He draws in on himself, arms around his calves, and his body rocks back and forth. His curls bob. "It... it would take too many words."

That sets everybody back--they know how hard it is for Jono to talk, or what he does instead of talking, and that it was pretty tough for him before he lost his mouth. It's not Monet the genius, or Everett the psychiatrist, or Jubilation the artist, or Paige the superstudent who comes up with the right answer.

"Then don't use words, ese," Angelo says. "Show it. Use pictures or whatever. However you remember it."

The smoking glare softens. Jono rocks harder, then Angelo realizes he's nodding. Blue-green eyes shut. His waxy brow creases. Hands cup over his temples. For a long minute, nothing happens. Angelo lights up another cigarette, guesses Jono's shut down for the night, then

He is eleven years old and this class is just so boring he can't stand it. He looks down at his hands--white skin, long fingers decorated with little clumsy papercuts--his desk, textbook open to the chapter on African history. A blue box appears at the bottom of his vision, and white text scrolls across it: "... how does anyone believe they can fit a whole bloody continent's history into one little chapter?" The box disappears. The tag on the back of his shirt digs like a knife into his neck. He daren't scratch or the teacher'll yell at him for fidgeting. Right now the teacher drones, her voice clear as a bell and her words totally garbled (Angelo, both watching and part of it, thinks Charlie Brown might be somewhere in the classroom).

He looks to his right. Another blue box appears as he regards the boy seated by him: "Reggie never gets caught squirming in his seat. Not like me." He watches as Reggie demonstrates this talent, leaning back in his chair like he's just cracking his back. A slip of paper appears to escape his hand and flies to the floor not far from Jono's feet (this must be Jono, isn't it? How he remembers it? How it makes it easier for him to remember it?). The paper makes a quiet "blip!" as it lands.

He moves his foot out into the aisle and steps on the paper. The teacher's voice suddenly gets louder. Another blue box:  
"MS. WINTHROP: Starsmore! Sit still!  
JONO: Yes, ma'am.  
MS. WINTHROP: I swear, you always--what have you got there?"

The teacher rises from her desk. Every footstep is accompanied by a pixelated smashing sound, the kind Angelo would expect of an action-game hero breaking a crate with his fist. She reaches down and plucks up the slip of paper. He looks over at Reggie. Reggie has turned white, so white the blue circles under his eyes look like makeup.

Blue box: "MS. WINTHROP: What's this, then? Shall I share it with the class?"

 _Nonononononono_ , Angelo thinks, but it's not his thoughts. _Don't, don't, please just drop it, just forget about it, just this once._

He sees Ms. Winthrop's face change--her thin lips vanish as her tongue flicks out of her mouth, her light eyes dull, her head rocks back on her neck. She stumbles back. The paper falls out of her iron grip. Jono's hand flies forward and he snatches it before it reaches the ground, tucks it into his breast pocket. Ms. Winthrop stares at the ceiling for a few seconds, until a wordless murmur rises from the rest of the class.

She blinks, looks around herself, and walks--quietly, this time--back to her desk.

MS WINTHROP: ... ... ... as I was saying. The Zulu--

Now he's in a washroom, the only boy in a stall, he doesn't have to piss, he needs to be alone. He sits on the rim of the toilet and he feels every molecule of air along his skin and catching his hair as he rocks front-back-front-back, arms crossed over his chest, his face aches from smiling. Angelo thinks: _Did I make her do that? I wanted her to forget it. And she did. Winthrop never forgets. Did I...?_

His fingers play over the buttoned-up front of his oppressive dress shirt. One hand sneaks under the collar and tugs uselessly at the razor-blade tag. The other lingers on his own chest, patting, and Angelo learns for the first time just how calming it is, how everything around Jono feels numb like it's all made of cotton and willpower, how centered he gets when he reassures himself of the physical. And then his fingers happen on something that shouldn't be there.

He looks down and sees nothing through his jacket or his shirt.

JONO: ... ?

He struggles to unbutton the jacket, pulls it open, and there it is--a bright spot of light glowing through his dress shirt, right over the left pocket.

JONO: !!!

His fingers fly over the buttons on his shirt, one pops off and hits the stall wall with a loud synthesized tink! and clacks to the floor. The shirt parts open and he stares at his pasty undefined chest. And there's a hole. A hole in his body. A hole not much bigger than a pencil eraser. A. Hole. In. His. Chest.

Angelo can hear Jono breathing--deep, almost whooping panic-breaths, and the whole stall appears to whiplash back and forth, he's rocking so hard and so fast. The garble of voices outside the stall catches Angelo's attention, and the blue boxes appear slowly, translating their scornful voices into words.

STUDENT A: What's that fucking racket, then?  
STUDENT B: Prolly it's the retard. He spazzes out in here sometimes.  
STUDENT A: Oh, that's just great. Why'd they let him come here, anyhow?  
STUDENT B: His parents used to have a title, mate, why else?

The box empties, growing and shrinking in Jono's vision as he rocks, and for a second, it hangs there useless. Then, centered, Angelo glimpses two words: _Level up!_

Slam-bang and he's fifteen, the little hole has grown into two fist-sized glowing wounds, one in his chest over his heart, one in his belly. Years of testing his own limits taught Jono two things: he can make things happen with his mind, all sorts of things, but every time he does, a piece of him falls away. He's too young and too put together to care much. He's sure it'll all be sorted out somehow, he'll find a doctor who'll give him skin grafts or something, he'll be well. The fascination with what his mind can do outweighs the damage to his body. He walks home from school with Reggie and Dexter and Paul, his uniform mussed with a day's worth of wear and his fingers working a little button pinned to the inside of his jacket, where no one can see it. White with THE CLASH in dark red on it. It's enough to know it's there. Those helpful blue boxes appear as Reggie opens his mouth, his voice garbled and lighthearted.

REGGIE: Shit, we have got to find another route, lads, I fuckin' hate the Barristers's dog.  
DEXTER: I know it. Stupid mutt barks at nothing.  
PAUL: It's not his fault. They leave the poor thing tied up outside all the time. I've seen it outside in the rain.  
DEXTER: Oh, Paul, you're such a sweet little thing.

Indistinct laughter, overlaid with piercing yips--Angelo doesn't hear them so much as feel them like a needle in his eye. He/Jono flinches, makes a soft sound of distress in the back of his throat. His vision drags over to the source of his pain. The dog, its fur rendered in Jono's memory as thick blocky strands, its eyes almost perfect squares, small and dirty and miserable, paws shoved up on the fencing as it announces its territory.

 _HurtsHurtsHurts please don't_ , Angelo thinks, _I know, I know you're scared and hurt but please don't it hurts me._

The dog's squared-off pink mouth closes. It cocks its head at Jono, ears shifting like it hears a whistle their human hearing can't pick up. They regard each other and Jono feels the dog's emotions flood into his own, mostly fear, hunger, and sadness. She just wants a pet and a warm place to sleep. He doesn't blame her. She's sorry she hurt him, he's sorry he scared her.

REGGIE: Oi, Jono!

He blinks and it's over. She tucks her tail between her legs and retreats, curling up near the front stoop. After a few very long seconds he turns to Reggie. Paul's reached his house and Dexter left them behind.

REGGIE: You all right, there? You look peaky.  
JONO: ... I'm... I'm okay.  
REGGIE: If you say so--hold on, what's wrong with your neck?  
JONO: ! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing I need to go.

Now he stands before a mirror in his room and he stares helplessly at the glowing blue spot on his neck, right above his collarbone. Four centimeters higher and it'd be above his shirt collar. Everyone would see. He barely avoided getting locked up because of The Autism (Angelo hears those words the way Jono must--the thought of them sounds like a crisp older Englishwoman's voice and feels like naked face-burning stomach-turning humiliation. Angelo never guessed that Jono could feel any emotion so reliant on social interaction, or feel it so profoundly deep, or feel it about how his own brain was wired).

If anybody saw this, he'd never see the light of day again.

Stop. Time to stop.

Blue box: _Level up!_

Three years pass in half a second and Angelo walks in Jono's body down a half-lit street at two a.m. For the first time music intrudes on the memory, a version of "White Riot" that sounds like boss-music from one of those fighter games. Here everything is a haze of pixels. The houses and shops are indistinct purple blocks, the street snakes black to his right marked with stark squares of gray that are supposed to be flecks of light. He looks down at himself. All the zippers on his black leather jacket are in place. The button with the swastika in a red circle with a slash through it is still there. He pats his jeans pocket and finds his wallet still chained to his belt loop. 

To his right is a bloke who looks like an older and more sardonic version of that Dexter kid. To his left is a woman who Angelo immediately knows is named Gayle; she's somewhere between punk and goth in her clothes, all black and spikes and these incredible heavy boots that go up over her knees. Angelo knows Gayle was a girl Jono met when she moved in on his street three years ago, she introduced him to the Clash and all that other punky shit he likes, she asked him out a year ago, and they stayed connected at the hip ever since.

And here come the blue boxes as Gayle's voice pipes up. The distortion is more mechanical than organic, she sounds like a robot trying and failing to talk. 

GAYLE: Next time, I'm buying.  
DEXTER: Ever the egalitarian.  
GAYLE: Like you give a shit, you wanker. You never pay for a damn thing.  
DEXTER: 's against my political principals. Besides, Jono's the one with the money.  
JONO: And you don't mind spending it. Ever.  
DEXTER: 'course not, mate. You're my favorite class traitor.

Laughter, all three of them, sounding like a trio of machines programmed to ape laughter without being told what it was. Angelo can't stop the creeps from running up his (metaphorical?) spine; something's not right here. Jono's trying way too hard to fake this memory up, distance himself from its details, hold its reality at bay.

A rustling noise (maybe? Hard to tell over the music and the distortion) and Jono turns his head, and there's four men running up behind them. White shirts black suspenders black pants black steel-toes, bald white heads shining unnaturally like scalped cyborgs. Fuck. Skinheads. Fuck. Skinheads who surely do not look as drunk as Jono feels. So drunk he led them all to a skin gang's turf, all of them with antifa buttons and in Gayle's case a shirt and all of them knifeless. Fuck--

Gayle gets first hit, her boot swings and the heel connects with a skin's calf and she crows as he screams, and it's all a chaos of mechanical groans and shrieks and insults, Dexter cackling with thick squares of blood staining his face from a cut on his forehead, Jono making a noise rendered in the blue box as "nnnnNNNNnnnnn" in the back of his throat. He holds his own for as long as he can but Gayle's always been the fighter and just as he's got one skin on the ground and reels back for a solid punch, he hears her scream like a robot possessed by the Devil and the blue box claims, absent any aural evidence, that she screams Jono's name and something long and gray cuts his vision in half and _a pipe!_

The world vanishes and _pain_ he feels it this time, his skin shatters like a dropped glass and his teeth meteor out of existence, for half a second he tastes blood and cold dirty iron and his jaw cracks right out of joint and his ears fill with a blank grind. Air passes cool across his cheeks as he falls back. His eyes shut and against his lids he senses the bloody tinge of light, faint but growing, and there's this crumbling rush all over his stomach and chest and face, he feels like a used napkin crunched into a ball in someone's hot and greasy fist.

The blue box cuts up beneath his eyelids. _Level up!_

Such light, blocks of white and blue and red and colors Jono nor Angelo cannot name force his eyes open and he sees what he's done. His body is a cannon. Brutal light pours out of him and the whole street glows like a bonfire, a subdued crackle as nearby windows break, he sees Dexter's sick wide-eyed slack-mouthed face then Dexter turns on his heel and _runs_.

He lays with the pavement cold and wet under his body soaking into his jeans until he senses at last that it's ending, the light dims and slowly retreats into his (body?) and the night returns to London. He hears a distant alarm going off, it sounds like a drilling bomb siren, he sits up. Two of the skins are still here. Both unconscious, one pouring red pixels from his scalp. Gayle is out as well, body slumped against the brick outside of some bank, chin on her chest, something between mist and smoke drifting up from her hair.

 _No,_ Angelo thinks, _no! No!no!no!no!no!_ and the chain goes on forever as Jono pushes himself to his feet, makes his unsteady way to her side, touches her face. He cannot feel a pulse. He flicks his fingers in front of his eyes, rubs his hands together, the sensation is almost entirely gone. He sits on the pavement and his mind is a tangled groan of terror, rocking doesn't help and punching the tops of his thighs feels like nothing and oh god oh god there's just nothing.

A synthesized noise Angelo can't identify sounds out. The blue box helps him out:

GAYLE: ... ... ... j-jono... you... *

He can't take her to hospital. Whatever is wrong with him, they can't help, they'll know it's all his fault and lock him up. He doesn't know where one is around here. He stares at her pixelated body helplessly, then, finally, his shaking, flapping hands find their way under her knees and her shoulder. She feels warm in his arms and her chest still rises and falls. He somehow finds his way to her mum's flat and gets her up the stairs unseen and sets her on the stoop and knocks on the door. He hears Gayle's mum drop a bottle and holler something he doesn't understand. He runs and the world retreats into his mental chorus of _no_ until next thing he knows he's in his room at home and his nanny's knocking at the door, telling him he's due for luncheon, he can't bear her to see him he can't bear to look at himself but she forces the door open and _screams_.

Four months later and his door opens again. He sees the intruder is wearing a pair of white stiletto-heeled boots, perfectly polished. He sits in the corner next to his guitar with his feet wedged under a pillow and his light restrained under a buckled scarf his nanny made for him. He watches the boots as they cross the carpeting. A set of white-clothed knees appears as the boots' owner kneels before him. 

He hears a voice and doesn't try to comprehend the words. Why try? He's been all but locked up in here since his parents found out about his injury. He can't talk. He's half-forgotten how to write much more than his own name and "yes" or "no". He doesn't need to eat or drink and he doesn't use the toilet and he doesn't bathe and he doesn't sleep. He sits and exists and that looks like how the rest of his life will be spent. No one has anything to say to him. Why try to hear it?

And then it happens. Jono (and Angelo, and probably everyone else) hears a voice over the voice. This one is as clear as a sheet of ice formed of purified water. This voice is calm, precise for an American, a little pleasantly nasal. A blue box appears over the intruder's right knee.

???: Hello, Jonothon. My name is Emma Frost. Can I sit here?

He stares at her. She sits anyhow. He focuses on her face, and perceives it in patchwork: a sharp chin, high cheekbones, smooth forehead, sleek strands of blonde hair tucked behind a pierced ear.

EMMA: Jonothon, are you happy here?  
EMMA: ... no, of course not. Don't look so surprised. I'm not speaking right now. I'm talking to your mind directly. It's not so special. You can do it, too. If you'd like me to teach you.  
JONO: ...?  
EMMA: Let me tell you about the school I work for.

It takes Angelo a few moments to really understand he's back in his own body, seeing through his own eyes and hearing only his own thoughts. He looks at his hands. His cigarette barely grew any ash. He feels like he's lived a few years and it probably took more like thirty seconds. He takes four quick puffs of his cigarette, touches his own face, feels the familiar slack and stubble and no cracks. He looks around.

The memory bomb Jono dropped left a lotta wreckage. Jubilation's hands are shielding her face from the room. Everett's not sitting nearby anymore, he's standing in the far corner next to the shelves of SNES and Genesis games, fingers picking through cartridges like he can't decide what to play, his shoulders shimmying. Paige stares at Jono. Monet sits with her head on her knees and sounds like she's quietly crying. Jono hasn't changed his body posture one iota.

What the fuck is there to say after everything? Nothing. Angelo smokes and watches as, one by one, everybody just silently gets up and leaves. Everett looks like he might say something when he passes the couch, closes his mouth, claps Jono on the shoulder instead. That's it. Even Jono's story might have been easy to handle if he told it on its own--but coming after everybody's, it got to be too much. By the time he finishes his cigarette, everybody's gone but him, Paige and Jono.

He drops the stub into the Dew can and finally stands up. His body puddles around his feet and spreads out like a shadow. He forces his skin to comply, feels it crawl up his legs and arrange itself so that he can make it upstairs without tripping, and the headache starts right on cue. "Hey," he says.

Silence.

"Hey. Jono. Jono. _Jono_."

Paige's husky voice adds in: "Jono? Are you all right, hon?"

The lids to his blue-green eyes finally open. He looks around bleary and confused. "... what?"

"It's okay, ese, it's over," Angelo says. "I'm'a go to bed before I melt all over you damn carpet. But, uh, just wanted to say thanks. I mean it was hard to watch an' all, but I'm glad you did. That's all." He coughs, looks over at Paige, who isn't budging. "You comin', Paige?"

"Later," she says, and oh. Oh. Oh, that's how it is. He's not stupid, there's really only one reason she'd hang back at this hour of the night. And she likes Jono, he can tell the way he knows Jubilation is into Everett and Everett's into Paige.

"Buenas noches." Angelo forces himself to slouch up the stairs and not look back. He's not curious whether Paige and Jono already have a thing going, or if the thing is about to start. He doesn't care. All those twisting branches of likes and crushes and suppressed feelings that already grow thick in this damn school, Angelo ain't part of it. He's never gonna be a guy any of the girls here would sigh over. Or any of the guys, not that he was on that team, not that Jono or Everett were either. He doesn't care. 

He's not thinking about it. Not thinking about it is better than thinking about that horde of skinheads and Gayle's limp body and wondering what happened to her after. He doesn't give a fuck (ha) what they're gonna do. He ain't into Paige. He's not jealous. He's not thinking about if certain parts of Jono's body still work. If all that blue fire feels like nothing to the touch or if it's warm or if it tingles. He doesn't. He doesn't care.

Everett's asleep when he gets to their room, and Angelo doesn't care. He cares so little that he doesn't hang out in the basement room again until after the spring break.


End file.
